Now is the perfect time to update your Creative Cloud desktop apps and services because the new updates make it even easier to get from “blank page” to “brilliant.” The latest Creative Cloud release includes great new features and performance improvements in your favorite apps as well as some key enhancements to Adobe Stock, including deeper integration with Creative Cloud apps and the addition of an all-new premium collection of high quality stock images. Below are my “Top 10” favorite new features in this latest release.

First, let’s talk about Adobe Stock, which now has more than 55 million royalty-free, high-quality photos, videos, illustrations, and graphics. There’s no easier way to start or perfect a creative project than using Adobe Stock. In fact, research from Pfeiffer Consulting confirms that incorporating Adobe Stock with Creative Cloud apps delivers up to 10 times the efficiency, compared to other stock services.

Adobe Stock enhancements include:

1.New Premium Collection. Explore our first premium content offering at Adobe Stock, which now includes approximately 100,000 hand-selected images from extraordinary artists whose content is sought after by top publications, marketers, and brands. Check out our FAQ post for more information.

2.One-Click Workflow. We’ve brought Stock assets even closer to your “canvas” so you can do more with Stock within the Creative Cloud apps. The deeper Adobe Stock integration now means you can select an image or video on the Adobe Stock website and place it into your work with a single click. Plus, we now have the industry-first one-click buy capability.

Coming soon in a future release, stock contributors will be able to contribute stock directly from the Adobe Lightroom CC and Bridge CC apps, giving them an easy on-ramp to showcase and sell their creative work. Also, a new Contributor Portal (beta) will launch, which will feature intelligent auto-tagging capabilities to make contributions even faster and easier.

If you haven’t yet tried Adobe Stock, there’s no better time. You can start now with 10 free images.

For Photoshop users, there are several exciting new features and performance improvements with this release. Some of my favorites:

3.Content-Aware Crop – When rotating or expanding an image beyond its original size using the Crop tool, sometimes you end up with image gaps around the edges. Content-Aware Crop addresses this by intelligently filling in the resulting gaps in an instant.

4.Face-Aware Liquify automatically detects faces and their components in an image, and then makes it simple to quickly adjust eyes, nose, mouth and other facial features, allowing users to create artistic facial effects easily.

5.Match Font, is an innovative new font recognition technology we previewed at Adobe MAX 2015 and is included in this release. Match Font scans an image, recognizes text within the image, and then identifies matching or similar fonts based on fonts you have access to, either locally on your machine or through Creative Cloud.

6.We’ve also introduced some new Performance Enhancements in Photoshop, including a 4x performance improvement when working with font menus and the Content-Aware Fill feature.

For more info on these and other great new Photoshop features, check out the Ps “What’s New” blog post.

Adobe Illustrator users will appreciate:

7.Fast Export of assets and artboards in Illustrator . When you need an icon scaled for multiple screen sizes, instead of exporting each size configuration individually, now you can export the icon across all the required size configurations simultaneously with a single click.

For more info on this and other great new Illustrator features, check out the Ai “What’s New” blog post.

For user experience designers:

8. Adobe XD Preview has gone global. Earlier this year we launched a preview of our exciting new user experience design app, XD. Today, XD is available in German, French and Japanese, and we’ve added some other new innovative features.

For more info on this and other great new Adobe XD features, check out the XD “What’s New” blog post.

Premiere Pro & After Effects users may have heard about the exciting new video app features we announced from the NAB conference in April. All of those new features arrive with this release, including:

9.Character Animator in After Effects, which makes it easy to match an animated character to a real-life actor’s speech and movements in real time. This latest update was recently tested by The Simpsons’ animation team when they used it for Homer Simpson’s live Q&A session in the May 15th episode. Read more about the updates to Character Animator.

10.New Virtual Reality features in Premiere Pro, including “field of view” mode which makes it easy for editors & filmmakers to preview media and see what the viewer will see.

Learn more about new features in Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Of course, this is just a small sampling of the great new updates in our June 2016 release. To see even more, be sure to check out our “What’s New” page or our Muse, InDesign, Animate, Audition and Dreamweaver blogs.
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